Small Business Expert: Your Toughest Customer Service Questions Answered Here

Editor’s Note: You asked and Micah Solomon answered. Today is the fifth response in Forbes’ weekly Ask An Expert series, running from now through the third week of November.

Question submitted by Rick Reed, via Forbes Comments:

"My question is about how to drive cultural change and build a culture of customer service excellence: I am now with a software company responsible for instilling the importance of customer service initiatives with all internal and external customers connections. Previously, I had the pleasure of working for Ritz Carlton Hotel Company for almost 8 years when Horst Schulze was leading the company... Here's my question: How do I get department managers and company ALL on board to drive and support daily?"

Small Business Expert Answer from Micah Solomon

Thanks, Rick. Driving cultural change and building a culture of customer service excellence depend on taking two powerful, but difficult, steps:

• Decide. Commit to a central philosophy that is both simple and hard to live up to–that can be captured in a short statement or even a single sentence. For example: “We provide only the highest level of service to our customers, our associates, and our vendors.” Or, to take an example from healthcare, The Mayo Clinic's spectacular seven word credo: "The needs of the patient come first."

When you worked at Ritz-Carlton with Mr. Schulze, as you mention above, you knew beyond a doubt that this decision had been made at the highest level of the organization. I don't know if you are in the same confident position about this at your new software company; if you are, then you are in good shape on the "decision" step.

• Figure out [and implement] what your decision means organizationally and behaviorally. And brace yourself: it will affect everything: Hiring • HR policies • Marketing and branding • IT initiatives • And so much more.

Specifically answering your question of how to daily get your department managers et al onboard and inspired, my suggestions aren't probably dissimilar from what you already know from your years with Ritz-Carlton:

• Distill your organizational service and operational principles into a very short, readable form. If appropriate in your organizational culture, I would suggest you even (a la the Ritz-Carlton) laminate the short-version of this so that every employee--yes that has to include execs– can carry them around in their pockets for reference.

• Have each of your departments hold frequent, very short (5 minute) meetings where your core service principles are discussed. Hold these huddles every day (if the software company's culture can allow for this) or every week if daily is impractical; have a different department member lead the meeting each day so the burden doesn't fall on any one person.

Now, part of "getting everyone onboard" is going to be realizing that not everyone wants to be onboard: Ultimately, some employees, and even some of your leadership, will likely decide that they can't embrace your newly emphatic culture of customer-centricity. That's o.k.; if some move on, there will be many others who want to work for a company such as you've had a hand in building.

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Question submitted by Bill Quiseng, via Forbes Comments:

"Micah, if you were a mid-level manager, how would you respond to your C-level boss who says to you that bringing in a customer service expert like you to train the frontline has no verifiable ROI?"

Small Business Expert answer from Micah Solomon

Thanks, Bill. If we broadly consider your phrase "improving the customer experience," what could possibly have a higher ROI (other than maybe striking gold or perfecting nuclear fusion).

However: How you should go about improving the customer experience depends on what the issues are in your organization. For example: Perhaps timeliness is the biggest issue, in which case frontline training may not be the most urgent priority in customer experience improvement (if the company's delays are caused by process design or technical problems).

So as a customer service consultant I would usually first work with the company to determine what challenges it's facing are most acute–the most painful lapses that need to be addressed. And, indeed, sometimes the most painful lapses are lack of frontline training. In which case, that's the place to go first.

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Question submitted by (I'm not making this up): ArtzFartzNewfie, via Twitter:

"Finding good service [workers] in the private sector as wages are low and its hard to find dedicated employees."

Small Business Expert answer from Micah Solomon

I see two questions implied within this tweet. Let me answer them both:

"In the private sector as wages are low": My answer: There's no choice but to pay employees fairly. My formula: Pay employees well, which I define as: Pay them in line with (or better) than what people in similar positions outside your company make, and pay them in line with what people in similar positions/with similar credentials/with similar quality of work inside your company make—and don’t forget the importance and ethical imperative of providing benefits.

"It's hard to find dedicated employees": My answer: Finding the right employees for customer-facing work requires a few tricks of the trade.

First: Always Be Scouting (ABS). You don't just hire when you're desperate, or you'll end up choosing out of desperation. Have everyone in your company be a recruiter, so you're picking from a very large pool and getting the best from that large pool rather than the best of what you receive randomly when you post hiring notices out of desperation.

Second: Know how to select the right employees for customer-facing work. You can't hire based on hunch, gut feeling, or a superficial impression of how well people interview. Instead, you need to have a goal of finding employees with the right traits. Which by and large is best accomplished by hiring to a profile. Until you have customized, internally validated hiring profiles, use my profile for selecting prospective employees for customer-facing work: WETCO (picture a big, wet dog outside of PETCO and you'll never forget this): Warmth • Empathy • Teamwork • Conscientiousness • Optimism (Here's a detailed discussion of these five traits.)

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Question submitted by @NowFeedback, via Twitter: "When will companies invest in their staff to train them to manage the Customer relationship wholly?"

Small Business Expert answer from Micah Solomon

The "when will they ever learn?" part of this question is unanswerable, I suppose, as the answer will vary by organization from "never--how does never work for you?" to more encouraging timelines.

What I can say is that superior customer service requires several elements. Assuming a company has indeed hired right staff (see my answers to the first question), someone at a high level in the company still needs to a) make, or continue making, a key decision: Are they going to put the customer at the center of what they do? If leadership does commit to this, then they need to b) provide the employees with what they need to support customers. Which includes an up to date, complete, and well-maintained toolbox (software, etc.), training and inspiration, empowerment to make decisions on behalf of the customer, and freedom to be involved in designing how work they are involved in is carried out.

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This was all we had room for in this feature, but please, readers: If you have more questions or issues, please let me know.--Micah